Bangladesh cricket team before Whatmore, lacked in discipline, professionalism, attitude and abilities. Since Whatmore Bangladesh has excelled in showing great discipline, professionalism and attitude. As the one thing one can notice to be missing is still the ability. On top of that Bangladesh team lags in attitude from time to time. This is okay by me, because they are not machines, from time to time they should fail to live up to high expectations as far as attitude is concerned.

I think Bangladesh lacked in the right attitude in this tournament. The simplest evidence of this is match after match collapse was allowed to take place. Collapse is the greatest proof of lacking the proper attitude. There is no reason for batsmen after batsmen to "throw" their wickets away. When this happens there is something fishy going on. Sure if the balls are unplayable that is another story. Other than one Lankan, one Indian and couple of Pakistanies I do not think any other bowler who played in this tournament has the ability to bowl unplayable ball unless of course by sheer luck.

Now back to abilities, that is still lacking. This is one part Whatmore can do little about. The Bangladesh team is what it is. Whatmore cannot inject talent into the players. Whatmore's approach is really simple, to bring a team up to a very high level of professionalism and consistency (i.e. attitude and discipline). I do believe that Whatmore feels talent will exist or not but if those other things are there, then with or without talent a team can be competitive. This competitiveness could lead to a scattered number of wins by taking advantage of the opposition's mistakes (the opposition is also not a team of machines therefore presenting some non-negative probability of success despite lacking talent). Now if by some miracle talent does show up in such a team not lacking in those other qualities, then the team will start winning.

So, as far as I can make assumptions about what is going through Whatmore's head, I can say that Mr. Whatmore is hoping someday soon talent will show up. Hope is good and in my understanding for the Bangladesh team, it is the only substitute for having to deal with a team lacking talent.

Therefore, per my assumption of Mr. Whatmore, I too hope that someday Bangladesh team will be presented with some talented cricketers of excellent abilities out on the field. In addition to that the most important hope of all is that, Bangladesh team keeps up the professionalism, attitude and discipline. Therefore, the team must learn why they lagged in some of these things during the Asia Cup 2004 tournament. In doing so, they can continue to be competitive at the international level and cut down on their performances as they have shown in this Asia Cup 2004.

[Edited on 7-29-2004 by Rho]

potshot

July 29, 2004, 08:44 PM

A brutally honest and accurate assessment,but not too many people will like to FTFTY here.

sageX

July 29, 2004, 09:48 PM

Talant is a gift. Talant need to be nurtured,pampered and sponsored. There are so many talant in the world goes to waste for lack of opportunity and guidence.

Talant inspire talant. Talant challange talant. One Talant can be the root based on wich new branch develope. For Example:

Sri Lanka
It started with Arbind D Silva. He was the Gavaskar of Sri Lanka. He was the first world class batsman in Sri Lanka. During A. D. Silva time Sri Lanka would strugle to last 3 days in a test against Quality team like Pakistan. A. D. Silva is playing since mid 80. Playing With him Develpoed Joysuria, Attapatu and Sangakara. This is what I meant by Talant tree branch. It took Srilanka atleast 12 years to produce 5 World Class batsman.

India
If you are die hard Indian Fan, then probably you can name a few the World Class batsman. I can recall only Gavaskar and kapil Dev. It is the dawn of the raw talant Sachin that brought new light in Indian Batting. Sachin showed the way for R. dravid, Sheweg, and Laxman. These whole set of world class batsman are inspired by Sachin. Since Kapil it took a long time for India to come to these pinacle.

For Bangladesh we are experiencing the time the Sri Lanka faced during 1980's. Sri Lanka came thru, so would we. It is painful for us as fan, but what can we do? We cannot beat the time and we cannot leave our team. We are still waiting for that root talant who will show our next generation the way to get it done. Ash can be the one, if he hold everything together and get the blessing.

This is how I feel. There is no need to validate it.

Rubu

July 29, 2004, 09:53 PM

I still (after today's duck) beleive ash will be in the PwC rating of first ten in five years.